]]>Expo Chicago: The International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern at Navy Pier

September 17 to September 20, 2015

Galerie Zürcher of Paris and New York with works by Cordy Ryman at Expo Chicago 2015. Photo: Deven Golden for artcritical.com

Four years into its latest iteration under the management of Tony Karman, what is there to say about Chicago Expo?

Let’s start with the art, which was wide ranging and of consistent high quality. Naturally, Chicago galleries were present in force and brought along some of the more pleasant surprises. For instance, at Richard Norton, two paintings by the hermetic Chicago painter Gertrude Abercrombie, notably Broken Limb (c. 1940). Corbett vs Dempsey, a gallery whose programming grows more interesting with each passing year, shared a booth with New York’s David Nolan Gallery, which allowed them to pair two Jim Nutt drawings across from Karl Wirsum’s painting Count Fasco’s Mouse Piece Whitey Jr. #2 (1983). In the Exposure section for smaller galleries, the one-year old Regards Gallery featured work by Megan Greene.

With the high cost of participation, there can be an understandable tendency in art fairs for galleries to spread their risk with overly wide selections of materials. This can easily lead to a kind of visual overload, where you see so much that you wind up remembering very little. Happily, to make a more forceful presentation perhaps, quite a number of booths at Chicago Expo showcased a single artist’s work. Flowers Gallery (London and New York), for instance, featured a notable mini-retrospective of Richard Smith, highlighting works from his “Kite” series, and created an invitation-sized catalog with essay especially for it. Galerie Zürcher, with venues in Paris and New York, featured a solo show of Cordy Ryman’s funky painted 2×4 sculptures and wall pieces that stood out for being so raw in a sea of polish. On Stellar Rays, out of New York’s Lower Eastside, focused on J.J. Peet, whose paintings, drawings, and a sculpture are so diverse they could be mistaken for a group installation. One of his paintings went on to be selected for the Northern Trust Arts Club of Chicago Purchase Prize. And Garth Greenen Gallery out of New York devoted his entire space to only three jewel-like paintings, each not much bigger than a sheet of notebook paper, by Victoria Gitman.

The professionalism, range, and quality of the galleries no doubt owed something to the selection committee, which included not only some of the heavy weight gallerists that one might expect – Marianne Boesky, David Zwirner, David Nolan, Rhona Hoffman, Isabella Bortolozzi – but also younger visionaries such as Jessica Silverman, Suzanne Vielmetter, John Corbett (Corbett vs Dempsey), and Candice Madey (On Stellar Rays). The result was a happy mix of blue chip, mid-range, and emerging dealers from 16 countries.

The art was good, then, and so too the venue. The large hall at the end of Navy Pier provided a friendly and vastly superior art viewing space than the slightly claustrophobic Merchandise Mart space that hosted previous fairs. The layout of the booths was generous and intelligent with wide, easy-to-navigate aisles. And Jason Pickelman’s JNL Graphics, the design team that gave the distinctive look to Chicago Art Expo during its heyday in the ‘90s, was once again in charge of the Expo’s image where a clean, professional atmosphere prevailed.

Flower Gallery of London and New York with works by Richard Smith at Expo Chicago 2015. Photo: Deven Golden for artcritical.com

This is all welcome news for an art fair that has gone through as many incarnations as Dr. Who. It’s hard to remember now, but for a long time in the 80s, the fair started by John Wilson to mirror Art Basel was the most important art fair in the Western Hemisphere. Reformulated by Thomas Blackman (who had been the director of the fair under Wilson) its dominance continued into the late ‘90s even as competitors emerged. But it stumbled as it entered the 21st Century, at one point with three competing fairs fighting for dominance, this at the same time that New York, and then Miami, began to become major venues. Moreover, when the first Chicago art fair opened in 1980, it was at the geographic center, literally, for American collectors who were also the major buyers. This is no longer the case; art collecting is international, with major collectors in London, Moscow, Dubai, and other world financial capitals flying from continent to continent to attend the 200 art fairs currently hosted annually. It is a long way to Chicago from Shanghai, or Abu Dhabi.

Chicago very much wants to host a world-class art fair. Tony Karman and his team, along with the selection committee, have worked very hard to give them one. The galleries came and brought the art. But it is yet to be decided if collectors can once again think of Chicago Expo as a must-see destination.

Installation shot of the exhibition under review with works by William Conger, both oil on canvas: left, Dervish, 2008, 54 x 60 inches, and Dutchman, 2011, 66 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Studio Vendome Projects

Before art magazines and the Internet flattened out the world and made us aware, perhaps overly so, of what artists everywhere were doing, artists developed their vision in dialogue with the place where they lived. As many know, Chicago had its own flavor of Pop Art in the 1960s and ‘70s: Imagism. Less well known are the many abstract artists there at the same time, engaged in loose but vital conversations with each other and other artists. Amongst them were Roland Ginzel, Thomas Kapsalis, Miyoko Ito, Richard Loving, and William Conger, whose recent works were recently on view in an exhibition organized by Saul Ostrow.

Simultaneously joyful and meditative, Conger’s paintings eschew anything that could be called outright representational. Yet consistently, insistently, they present a clearly identifiable space, albeit one defined by extremely flat perspective. The paint, oil for the larger works and gouache for the smaller ones, is applied with small careful strokes in thin blended colors, which then gently add up to large undulating planes of muted color. These large areas are, in turn, bounded and intersected by thick lines that are similarly, if less expansively, multicolored. The resulting images are oddly organic, strangely familiar, and resonate with undeniable emotional undertones. Perhaps it is simply human nature to try and ascribe recognizable objects to forms no matter how abstract, but Conger’s paintings elude the Rorschach test.

Take, for instance, one of the larger paintings in the exhibition, the wonderful Dutchman (2011). Blue and violet geometric shapes make up a ground on which yellow, orange, red rounded forms (mostly) overlay. Gray-black lines, reminiscent of vine charcoal stick, weave in and out, behind and in front. The verticality of the canvas pushes a figurative reading — for a brief moment one might think Mickey Mouse on Owsley Acid — while the rounding of the forms and opalescent color leans decidedly more to thoughts of landscape. If this sounds confounding or unsettling, in person this dichotomy is much more likely to engender a sense of calm reflection. A tangential but related experience might be found viewing medieval stained-glass windows: shards of colored glass held together with lead present highly fragmented images that nonetheless imbue an overall feeling of wholeness.

Distant echoes and subtle influences clearly remain in Conger’s work from his early years in New Mexico looking at Raymond Jonson and other painters from the Transcendental Painting Group. Overall, however, Conger’s late works highlight the particular qualities of Chicago’s abstract style, favoring drawing and line over expressionistic brushwork resulting in there being more hand and less arm in the strokes. Imparting the impression of being a slower process, Chicago abstraction is less dependent on serendipity than its New York counterpart. There are exceptions, of course, and then one must also ask, if after 50 years as a major artist in Chicago, does Conger’s work look like the Chicago style, or does the Chicago style look like Conger’s work? A larger, more inclusive exhibition would be the way to find out.

October 11 to November 10, 2013
56 Bogart Street, at Harrison Place
Bushwick, (718) 852-4396

A one-room gallery in Bushwick provides the unlikely setting for what is arguably one of the most elegant solo shows of the Fall season. Meg Hitchcock, formerly a painter of likable if unexciting lacy abstractions, came up with a fully-formed concept five years ago that sprang to mind, according to the artist, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Simply put, she would disassemble sacred texts into their individual letters and then reassemble these same letters into passages from other sacred texts. She cuts up Psalm 23 from the Old Testament, for example, and pastes its letters into a passage from the Koran. A self-confessed heavy reader of religious writings, and literature with a spiritual bent in general, Hitchcock makes literal the deconstruction necessary for the analysis of text.

The work’s visual impact is immediate. Almost exclusively black and white works on paper, they present themselves as simple graphic designs. A few of them appear as recognizable images – a tree branch, a flaming circle – but most allude to tantric symbols, mandalas, or Kabbalistic images. Their sensuality is undeniable, and one is enticed to closer inspection, and it is at this point that we seethat the images are comprised entirely of typeset letters. By the time one’s noseis mere inches away,, the work’s austere terrain becomes monumental, the edge of each little square piece of paper – not much bigger than the letter printed on it – standing in relative high relief to the paper it’s glued on. Hitchcock’s process, in spite of being immaculate in execution, registers as the opposite of mechanized. Her touch is light and resonates with meditation not drudgery.

Once the viewer is aware that the image is comprised solely of text, they are lead, inexorably, to attempt reading the work. Which, because they are based on often-familiar texts, proves surprisingly easy. Not that the entire passage is immediately available to the eye, but the opening thread, “Amazing Grace” for instance, will stand out. Grabbing that thread will, for the more ambitious, lead into reading more of the text, if only to confirm the derivation of the text. One looks to the wall label for help and is intrigued further: Amazing Grace, Letters cut from the Bhagavad Gita, 2013. On an intellectual pilgrimage, we move from label to label – The Prophets: Surah 21 from the Koran, Letters cut from the Bible (The Book of Psalms), 2013; Mundaka Upanishad, Letters cut from the Koran, 2012; or The Sun: Surah 91 from the Koran, Letters cut from the Bible. The palpable joy of following the artist down this rabbit hole can be transformative. The single sculpture/installation in the show, Trimalchio’s Feast: The Declaration of Independence, Letters cut from “The Satyricon” by Petronius, 2013, expands on not only the artist’s materials, but on the possible definition of what might be considered a sacred text. There is a vision and a mind at work here.

As the late Arthur Danto often emphasized, the subject of most contemporary art is art itself, a circular dialogue within the art community. Rarely does an artist find a way to step out of this circle and instead make their art an exploration about who they are as people – how they think, what is important to them on a daily basis – and wed it to a process that not only intimately mirrors this, but allows viewers to actively participate in their discoveries. Mark Lombardi, whose obsession with conspiracies resulted in exquisitely drawn flow charts, comes to mind as another example of this. With this kind of art, all the elements – subject, technique, process, materials, and image – are so intertwined, and in such harmony with each other, that they exude a sense of inevitability. Conversely, and more to the point, aesthetic impact — the pure pleasure derived from engaging with each piece — is ensured by all of these elements being transparent and available to the viewer. These spare, works manage to be at once, intellectually satisfying, emotionally powerful, and visually stunning.

Installation shot of Stanley Whitney: Other Colors I Forget at Team Gallery, New York, April 11 to May 12, 2013

Stanley Whitney has over five decades painting behind him. The seven large luscious paintings currently on view at Team Gallery constitute his 28th solo exhibition, so it is maybe little wonder that, at this point, his technique appears effortless. Indeed, the work displays a beguiling simplicity. There are sixteen or twenty rectangles in each square painting and they are, more or less, evenly apportioned four down and four, or five, across – not by ruled measurement but an equally exact though ineffable idea of rightness. These are formal paintings, grids of quadrilaterals, but casual and unpretentious, like a conversation one might have about the checkered tablecloths at your favorite trattoria. The same sense of ease holds true for the paint application, and for a few moments one might get an impression that the brushwork is almost careless. This is, however, a manifestly false reading and it quickly transmutes into an awareness of acute fastidiousness.

Take the largest work, for instance, the eight-foot square Bodyheat, (2012). Hanging solo in the rear gallery, where it can enjoy the most controlled lighting, it dominates the small room with a quiet authority and grace. The rectangles, arrayed in this particular piece five across and four down, are topped and separated on the horizontal by thick stripes that simultaneously delineate and activate the grid. For the most part the colors directly abut, shoulder to shoulder, but in a few cases an additional fat stroke puts in extra duty. In the top row a slash of salmon keeps the orange square from combining with the orange line just below, while in the second row from the top, a scumble of slightly darker blue achieves the same end between the blue rectangle and all but identically-colored line below.

Conversely, the unusual blended stroke dividing the yellow from the green serves to modulate and mellow what would otherwise be a potentially harsh juxtaposition. And in the same vein, a wash of blue at the top of the pale yellow/green square in the bottom row eases the dialogue between it and the dark blue stripe above it. Meanwhile, in the bottom right corner the paint in the lower half of the black square dissolves in drips, a permanent history of its interaction with the wet medium.

The cumulative effect of these additional strokes and wet drips is to highlight their outlier nature: there is not a single unintentional mark in any of these paintings. Echoing this low key but firm control are the colors themselves: blue, green, yellow, red, orange, brown, black and white. Such a simple list brings to mind the basic box of 8 Crayola Crayons. As elsewhere, sustained looking quickly alters this perception, each mottled or extenuated color being an overlay of another, the palette expanding to six variations of green, five of red, and so forth. We are made aware that individual colors mean naught, while the syntax and syncopation of the colors are everything.

Whitney nonchalantly weaves together nearly invisible yet precise technique, lightly imposed yet persistent structure, and a simple yet sophisticated use of color. The resulting works are as playful as they are powerful as they flutter and wave against the cool white walls whose flatness they eviscerate with hardly a sigh.

Denyse Thomasos in front of her monumental wall-painting at Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn in 2006. Courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg Inc.

Denyse Thomasos, a painter whose works are at once conceptual and abstract, intimate and monumental, died suddenly on Thursday, July 19th. The cause was an unexpected allergic reaction during a medical procedure. She was 47

Born in Trinidad, her family moved to Canada when she was 6 years old. She developed an interest in art early on, and in 1987 she graduated from the University of Toronto with a BA in painting and art history. She then attended Yale, where she received an MFA in painting and sculpture in 1989. Upon graduating, she immediately moved to New York and began teaching at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. In 1995 she became an Assistant Professor in Painting at Rutgers.

Thomasos’s bold, sometimes monochromatic, gridded abstractions have a visceral kick that immediately draws the viewer in. Layered fat strokes of acrylic paint hover in a constant state of flux, sketching out the frameworks of architectural structures that exist on the edge, caught precariously between full formation and total collapse. Though successful on a purely abstract level, Thomasos spoke of more earthbound, often darker themes when asked to discuss her work. A frequent world traveler, she spent a great deal of time studying prisons and slums, looking at ways disenfranchised people are constrained, both physically and socially. Coming from a privileged background herself, she struggled intellectually and emotionally to understand how culture can warp self-perception and, ultimately, destiny. Taken in this light, the super-enlarged crosshatches cascading across her canvases are not a loose representation of actual places, but an attempt, repeated consistently over many years, to create a multi-dimensional map for understanding the world as we live in it. The intensity and passion Thomasos brought to this project, as much as the subject itself, are inextricably woven into the palpable frisson her paintings elicit.

Thomasos exhibited regularly and had over 15 solo-exhibitions. Olga Korper began representing her in Toronto from 1994, and Lennon Weinberg in New York from 1996, and both continue to do so. She received numerous prestigious awards and grants, including multiple grants from the Canada Council, a regional NEA grant, two Pew Fellowships, grants and residencies from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Ucross, NYFA, the Guggenheim, Marie Walsh Sharpe, the Bellagio Foundation, P.S. 122, Mac Dowell, and Yaddo. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, along with many other major corporate collections. Reviews of her shows appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artnews, Artforum, Art in America, and the Village Voice among many others.

Interviewed for Rutgers Observer TV in February 2011, Thomasos said, “I have had the most magical life I could imagine…every dream I’ve ever dreamed has come true…to travel around the world. Being an artist you have the opportunity to live a creative life every minute of the day…it feels like I’m an explorer…and I get to translate everything that I’ve seen, show it in a gallery, and get feedback from audiences. I love every aspect of it…”

Thomasos is survived by her husband, documentary filmmaker Samien Priester, and her daughter, Syann.

For more than three decades, Harriet Korman has been on a mission to strip her work down to its irreducible elements. The current exhibition of thirteen modestly-sized yet surprisingly monumental paintings finds her boiling away what little fat remained of her vision. Those familiar with her work might have thought there was not much left to do without, as her previous exhibition featured simple biomorphic shapes rendered in solid blocks of color sans shadow, overlap, or dimensionality. As it turns out, for Korman curved lines are expendable too.

Replacing the swooping forms of the preceding works is a series of triangles within grids of rectangles, with patterns and layouts resembling a child’s first geometric coloring book. The resulting deadpan compositions work decisively to undermine the viewer’s ability to project meaning–subjective or otherwise. In short, by deleting curves along with their subtle underlying hint of personality, Korman’s paintings appear to a startling degree to be purely objective.

There is another curious element to these artworks that may at first elude notice, so infrequently is it a factor: they are 100% flat. In his famous 1955 essay “Modernist Painting”, Clement Greenberg suggested that to move forward painting should eschew the traditional depiction of space in favor of embracing the reality of the essential flatness of the painting surface. Yet while this concept has found a secure place in the practice of art, it is hard to name abstract painters from Greenberg’s time to ours whose paintings actually appear without any illusion of visual depth. Overwhelmingly, from Pollock’s drips to Chris Martin’s slavered brushwork, the perception of space, of foreground and background persists. Not so in Korman’s work, which refuses to imply anything beyond the surface, adamantly inhabiting a single plane of existence.

What remains? Denuded of meaningful subject, other than the painting itself, or of figure/ground relationship, or of any of the content available to traditional depictive strategies, Korman bets everything on the three things left: color, brushwork, and line. Color, naturally, starts off the conversation as it reaches out from the greatest distance. Indeed Converge, 2011, beckons convincingly all the way from the far back wall of the long floor-through gallery space. Like everything else in this body of work, Korman favors a simple, rather than simplistic, palette. Luminous variations of blues, reds, yellows, greens, and oranges predominate, rounded out with violets and tertiary red-browns. Each solid color, subtly fluctuating, is applied with a careful but not overly fussy touch. The oil is not strictly speaking a wash, but is thin enough to allow the ground to abet the painting’s substantial glow. If one looks closely, one can discern the elegant yet matter of fact brushstrokes.

Once you get close to the brushwork, the sensitivity of Korman’s minimal draftsmanship reveals itself. For whether the artist creates the under-drawing defining the shapes with a straightedge or not, it is clear that each tenuous border is painted without one – the color gently pulled to obey by Korman’s hyperconscious hand. This tremolo effect, though barely perceptible, supplies the paintings with their undeniable warmth and humanity. So, although what remains is reductive in the extreme, there is material aplenty for deep meditation on what painting can achieve.

March 1 to March 31, 2012
?532 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 367-9663

Ellen Berkenblit has been confounding expectations since her first solo show in 1984, a trend that happily extends to her current exhibition. Her dissonant, emotionally charged palette, with dark colors that would be at home in an Ernst Kirchner, is pushed to extremes in 20 new paintings filling Anton Kern’s cavernous space. And intense palette is just an opening salvo, for while riffing on her established lexicon of female profiles (with a high-heeled leg or two thrown into the mix), Berkenblit manages to flip the traditional figure/ground relationship literally on its head.

One is immediately aware that there is something especially unsettling going on here. The regular heroine of her past work – she of the bobbed nose, Betty Boop eyes, and shy demeanor – has been replaced. In her stead is a pointy-nosed, gap-toothed, grinning lass, her flying blond hair – pink ribbon notwithstanding –displaying an undeniably greenish tinge. Witch imagery, invoking tangential thoughts of spells, altered states, and female power, is alluded to but ultimately not insisted upon.

The main character’s changed appearance, while noteworthy, is not disturbing. Rather, it is her now extremely casual relationship with gravity. Whereas previously Berkenblit’s figures existed, for the most part, in a world that recognized the existence of gravity and corresponded to traditional notions of top and bottom, her new heroine might enter the paintings from any angle: upper right or left or even, à la Georg Baselitz, from the top. Looking at one particular installation of three larger paintings, it is hard not to resist seeing her blond protagonist doing a full loop-de-loop.

This is about more than figures in flight. There is a conceptual inversion at play, recalling for this reviewer Shusaku Arakawa’s 1970s series of paintings combining text with colors in which legibility was undermined by the image’s visual logic. In a similar way, looking at Berkenblit’s Broken Pane of Frosted Glass, 2012, there is a natural urge to isolate, identify, and create a narrative from the various elements: face, quarter moons, stars, leg, high-heel. But, as with the Arakawa’s, the colors continually take precedent and pull the viewer’s eye contrary to representational logic. The dichotomy created between figuration and abstraction simply refuses to coalesce, a frisson that supercharges the surface: it is not just the heroine of the paintings doing back-flips, but the entire figure-ground relationship.

Berkenblit has never shied away from experimentation and risk in her work. In one past series she painted on metal grates (a series of works that looks increasingly better in retrospect) and she has worked exclusively in black and white for an entire exhibition. This latest body of work consolidates a decade of her thinking about color, image, narration, and abstraction, the resulting optical turmoil leading to visual pleasures exciting and wild.

We expect art today to be portable. We believe that a painting, properly installed, will have a similar effect on us regardless of what city we are seeing it in. Yet seeing the Baldessari retrospective in Los Angeles and New York were palpably different experiences for this viewer, with the LACMA presentation making a far more favorable impression.

Both installations were, without question, well done. And while the Metropolitan left out a few works that were included in the LACMA show, it too included the key works presented in chronological order. So the only real differences, then, are the spaces and cities themselves. LACMA’s exhibition used its new Renzo Piano-designed building, which features spacious, naturally lit galleries, modulated via Piano’s signature louver system, throughout its top floor main exhibition area. The ample, light infused rooms evoke a subtle but unmistakable feeling of being outdoors.

Which brings us back to Baldessari. Baldessari was among a group of California artists – others include Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin – who emerged from a local variety of Pop Art in the 1960s. A key attribute of this group was to question authority via conceptual practices, and in this Baldessari excelled from the beginning. Take, for example, Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell, 1966-68. It presents itself as a simple yellow and black painting spelling out three bullet-points of advice, yet it plays a strange game. Like Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, it is a painting purporting to be a sign, not a painting. It contains none of the images it declares are essential to its own success. And while the work is inherently critical of mass culture it is not, in fact, critical of the viewer but instead depends on the viewer’s complicity to achieve its effect.

Requiring the viewer’s participation is, by implication, also to insist on the egalitarian nature of art. For Baldessari this manifests on a number of levels, working to undermine not only the idea of a privileged maker/viewer scenario, but also the concept of hierarchy in the works. In Violent Space Series: Two Stares Making a Point but Blocked by a Plane (for Malevich), 1977, for instance, an appropriated movie still collides, literally, with a large white abstract shape (or is that just a negative space?) confounding meaning while inducing drama. Conversely, in Prima Facie (Fifth State): Warm Brownie/American Cheese/Carrot Stick/Black Bean Soup/Perky Peach/Leek, 2006, the artist sets up a faux color chart which passive-aggressively asks the viewer for their thoughts on minimalist art and what, if anything, color actually means.

Motion is pivotal in all of these works, although sometimes, as in Baldessari’s videos, the movement comes courtesy of the actors on the screen rather than the viewer. In the deadpan and decidedly Sisyphean Six Colorful Inside Jobs, 1977, a camera stares down god-like from above as a man paints an entire room first red, then in quick succession orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Watching him paint, you think at first that he has painted himself into a corner, only to see a hidden door open to provide escape from the claustrophobic environment.

In a way, this mirrors Baldessari’s own escape from the confinement of being locked to a particular style, medium, or definition of art, or even, on a more quotidian level, of being forced to spend his time inside a traditional artist’s studio. Conceptually and literally, Baldessari wants to go outside to look for ideas and meaning. Which takes us back to why seeing this retrospective at the LACMA venue provided such a different experience. Being outside, specifically outside in southern California, is to be immersed in the hit-the-road-and-find-yourself car culture from which Baldessari’s work could find the essential freedom and context necessary for its growth.

The Backs of All the Trucks Passed While Driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January, 1963, presented as 32 photographs in a grid, speaks eloquently of this. The photographs impart intimations of what is to come. Motion, intrinsic to all of Baldessari’s work, is both literal and implied, as the trucks, after all, will be passed.

its unadorned simplicity of conception and its systematic, yet matter of fact cropping, The Backs of All Trucks… is pure Baldessari. His quest for discovery is transformed into a road trip, and in a small red roadster to boot. This is in itself so quintessentially Californian, for nowhere else was this iconic part of the American dream of finding oneself in, and through, the landscape so pursued and distilled. As you walk through this forty-year retrospective you realize that if there is one true thing you can say about John Baldessari, it is that he has always been on the move, determined to explore everything he finds along the way. It’s been an inspired trip so far.

]]>http://www.artcritical.com/2011/03/04/baldessari/feed/2Frida Kahlo: Her Photoshttp://www.artcritical.com/2011/01/08/frida-kahlo-her-photos/
http://www.artcritical.com/2011/01/08/frida-kahlo-her-photos/#commentsSat, 08 Jan 2011 20:00:34 +0000http://artcritical.com/?p=12925It should come as no surprise that Frida Kahlo, whose own dramatic life was the primary subject of her art, kept a major collection of photographs important to her. With the intense interest in Kahlo created by Hayden Herrera’s seminal biography, you might in fact wonder, why have we never seen these photos? Okay, funny...

]]>It should come as no surprise that Frida Kahlo, whose own dramatic life was the primary subject of her art, kept a major collection of photographs important to her. With the intense interest in Kahlo created by Hayden Herrera’s seminal biography, you might in fact wonder, why have we never seen these photos? Okay, funny story: It turns out that when Frida Kahlo died in 1954, Diego Rivera gave her photo archive to his friend and executor Lola Olmedo with instructions not to open it for 15 years. Ms. Olmedo, it is reported, apparently felt that if Diego didn’t want to open the archive to the public, who was she to open it? So she didn’t, and it wasn’t until after her death 50 years later that the archive was finally opened and the cataloging could begin. Frida Kahlo: Her Photos is the first book to publish some of the photographs from the archive, but no doubt not the last, as the over 500 images reproduced represent less than 10% of the total collection.

Guillermo Kahlo, Self-Portrait. nd. Reproduced in the book under review.

What has been selected for this volume, under the guidance of Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, is nothing short of a revelation. Divided into seven sections—“The Origins,” “Father,” “The Casa Azul,” “Broken Body,” “Love,” “Photography,” and “Political Struggle” —each accompanied by a short, concise essay, Frida Kahlo: Her Photos offers a panoramic view of the artist’s life, interests, and milieu. It’s all there, Kahlo’s grandparents, her parents and siblings, her friends and lovers, and, it would seem, any and all of the assorted important people who passed through Mexico during the middle years of the 20th century. There is Trotsky, of course, but also Isamu Noguchi (photographed by Edward Weston), Dolores del Rio, Marcel Duchamp, Henry Ford, and Sergei Eisenstein to name but a few.

But even among this amazing group of personages, one stands apart: Guillermo Kahlo, the artist’s father. A professional photographer himself, his influence on Frida is made crystalline through the dozens of photos by him and of him. It is not just the straight-ahead, confrontational gaze clearly presaging his daughter’s favored compositional device; it is the undeniable modernist sensibility present from some of the earliest works forward. In photo after photo, we witness an artist who is self-aware, at times bemused, at other times deeply self-critical. Many of his self-portraits are nearly clinical in their unvarnished documentation; we watch as he ages from dashing young man to middle-aged stolid father to world-weary elder. The last image, dated 1932, shows him looking frail, with white hair and cigarette in hand, and has the words “Guillermo Kahlo, after crying” written in ink across the bottom. What talent Frida inherited from her father may be an open question, but that she absorbed his modernism and probing psychology, the key things at the very heart of her, there can be no debate.

The reasons Diego Rivera thought this photo archive should be hidden for a time are not contained in this volume. Perhaps there are other images that were kept out that would answer this question and perhaps not. But we can say with assurance that we are exceedingly fortunate that, decades after everyone in these photos are long dead, we are able to witness the very full telling of their lives. It turns out that Frida Kahlo was intent on amassing an image record far beyond her own likeness, including everyone of interest around her as well. Frida Kahlo: Her Photos is a brilliant testimony to the successful realization of her goal.

Jim Nutt is part of the Chicago Imagists group which emerged in the 1960s as a regional version of Pop Art. His fellows included Ed Paschke, Karl Wirsum, Barbara Rossi, Roger Brown, Suellen Rocca, Christina Ramberg, Ed Flood, Art Green, and Nutt’s wife Gladys Nilsson, almost all of them students of Ray Yoshida’s at the School of the Art Institute. Unlike the New York Pop movement, the Chicago variety took pop culture as a starting point and then diverged in two important ways. First, its focus was on a much darker, more sexually charged imagery such as that found in burlesque photographs, wrestling posters, underground comics, and pinball machines. Second, where the New York variety presented a cool, decidedly non-expressionist style of rendering, Nutt and the other Chicagoans reveled in a controlled but highly personal approach to drawing. Nutt’s earliest work in this mini-retrospective, Miss Sue Port, 1967, in acrylic on Plexiglas, presents an iconic example of this. Part freak show poster, part Pinball machine glass, it features an electric yellow androgynous personage with one extremely large, pointed breast, bulging cod-piece, truncated arms, a horror show face, and a massive, corseted posterior. A potent cocktail of revulsion and attraction, this is precisely the kind of work that brought the Chicago Imagists to critical attention.

Over time, Nutt diverged from his Pop culture beginnings and the work began a gradual shift to a quieter internal narrative. The hyper-inventive figuration stayed, but Nutt slowly shed overt cultural references. By the early seventies, as represented in this show by the colored pencil drawing There Are Reasons, 1974, , the artist was playing with images of stage sets featuring wildly cavorting and contorted figures enacting sexually overt pantomimes. What followed was a consistent reduction in the amount of secondary information, coupled with an increasing focus on the figure. By the late eighties Nutt had narrowed everything down to isolated, singular, portraits.

The current series of refined women’s heads as presented in the main gallery is experienced as a packed and careful condensation of Nutt’s vision. For while the early works like Miss Sue Port feature tight compositions with dozens of objects and figures (the term horror vacui comes to mind), from a strictly mark-making perspective they are painted with the broadest of strokes. By contrast, in the later paintings the brush strokes are barely the size of an eyelash. Needless to say, making a painting with a brush this tiny requires literally thousands of marks. The result is a little less stuff, but a great deal more information being filled into each picture. This is no doubt part of the reason why Nutt produces but a few paintings a year. Indeed, of the seven drawings and three paintings representing the current work, only five of the drawings are from this year, and only one of the paintings, Trim.

It is not the process of making the paintings that stands out, but their hard won commitment to seeing. Standing in the main gallery, a quiet yet powerful meditative vibration seems to emanate directly from the works. Nothing is facile in these recent paintings and drawings; every mark is precise, meaningful and clear. This is easiest to discern in the drawings, where brief strong lines delineate a myriad of features and textures against the emptiness of the paper. The paintings have the same intensity of line, and add subtle modulations of color and tone. In whichever medium, when a female head is depicted, the individuality of the features are intensified, not obfuscated, by the careful abstraction of each nose, eye, ear, and mouth. As in Cubism, the features differentiate within a single picture because they compress many moments into a single image. But there is more to the time compression than that. Nutt’s silent women simultaneously look at us and through us. Ignoring our pressing gaze, they look unrelentingly inward.